BEFORE OAKLAND fancied itself as a basketball town, which was right after it pronounced itself a football town, it loomed largest as a baseball town.

Oakland produced two future baseball Hall of Famers, Harry Hooper and Ernie Lombardi, and loads of major leaguers before the Warriors and Raiders ever existed.

And baseball remains Oakland’s greatest sports legacy. The late George Powles groomed 27 big league ballplayers by himself on Oakland’s playgrounds.

But this same baseball legacy in Oakland, which also sent Frank Robinson, Joe Morgan and Rickey Henderson to Cooperstown, is in serious disrepair.

First, there was the city’s shabby maintenance of its ballfields for kids. Now Oakland’s primary youth baseball development program has hit a dead end.

For the past 20 years, Jethro McIntyre has run a 10-week free Sunday autumn youth baseball clinic in Oakland, though part of that time he’s been forced to relocate to Alameda in order to find accommodations.

Big league All-Stars CC Sabathia, Jimmy Rollins and Dontrelle Willis were taught baseball at McIntyre’s clinic. Now he has no field at all, at least not in Oakland or Alameda, and his clinic was scheduled to start this Sunday.

He’s hoping to start a week later at Liberty High in Brentwood, but even that site was iffy when last we spoke Wednesday.

But why not Oakland, the clinic’s birthplace?

“No funding,” said McIntyre. “No cooperation from the city in keeping up the fields. They won’t even pick up the goose droppings, a health hazard for kids. We’ve been fighting this battle for 21 years. The city has never embraced us.”

So how does Oakland develop the next Rickey Henderson, if that’s humanly possible, without McIntyre’s strictly volunteer baseball clinic?

Well, it doesn’t have a chance, if you listen to Tillman Thomas Pugh.

“If they didn’t have programs like that,” said Pugh, a New York Mets outfield prospect, “I feel the amount of especially inner-city African-American players would be playing football or basketball.

“A lot of African-Americans see football and basketball as kind of a quicker means to an end. In baseball, you have to put more time in. And football and basketball have more glamour. You don’t see that a lot in baseball.”

Oakland native Pugh, 21, attended Montclair Elementary School, Montera Junior High, Bishop O’Dowd and Skyline High. He finished high school at De La Salle, then continued his academic road rally by enrolling at Arizona State, transferring to a Phoenix community college, and then being drafted this year out of Sonoma State by the Mets in the 15th round.

Hit by the very first pitch he saw with the Gulf Coast (Rookie League) Mets, he suffered facial fractures and was sidelined five weeks. He hit .230 in 23 games after that long layoff, but improved to .276 in his last 10 games.

The 6-foot, 190-pound Pugh, a standout running back at De La Salle, chose baseball because “I hated getting hit.” How many Oakland inner city kids would make the same choice given the lack of Powles-like sage baseball instruction?

And McIntyre offers professional instruction. He pitched in the minors, and his top assistant, Bert Strane, also played professionally. Yet such valuable teaching experience, and dedication, mean nothing to Oakland after 20 years.

And baseball was the game in Oakland in the 1950s and 1960s when McIntyre, 65, and Strane, 63, were inner-city kids.

“Because there were players who went to the big leagues who looked like us,” explained Strane, an African-American like McIntyre.

For just this weekend there will be a free baseball clinic for kids ages 7-18, 9 a.m.-3 p.m. Saturday and Sunday at Oakland’s Greenman Field, 1390 66th Ave. Ex-big leaguers Terry Whitfield and Nate Oliver will join McIntyre and Strane.

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